Ploa is a desktop companion I came up with this week for managing Plone sites. The project is a result of needing to get stuff done with Plone and deciding that the Rest API was the best interface. I wanted to empower my clients and Ploa was the result. It currently provides a desktop tool primarily for managing keywords and blocks. Let’s see where it goes from here.
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Why would a desktop application be better than providing/fixing/improving the same functionality directly through Plone/Volto? It feels completely odd to give users a second supplementary tool in their hands…only my POV.
@zopyx very good and important questions 
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I was having a hard time bringing what I needed to a specific Plone project within the constraints of Volto. Compared to calling the REST API, it just felt indirect and slow. So my first motivation was… “find a way to ship value for the customer”.
I started with a Plone API Shell, a commandline interface to the REST API. In general, speaking as directly as possible to the REST API has become useful for quickly developing capabilities that I don’t have out of the box with Volto/Plone. Once I saw progress with the shell approach, Ploa was the next step, it allowed me to provide keyword management features to my customers before it has been mainstreamed in a stable Volto/Plone release.
By tapping into the Plone REST API I’ve been able to decouple from the release cycle. This has made it possible to introduce new capabilities faster with lower-friction and nearly zero risk to the live Plone site. I consider this a win.
It doesn’t hurt to also have a native power-user experience that is trickier to achieve within a standard web browser.
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I agree with your approach. The browser is a popular hammer. But breaking the rules is a good starting point for good design.
Before we had the search and filtering of registry entries in Plone Classic UI, I wrote a prototype showing the functionality to Timo during a sprint. If the productivity gain is feelable, you can think about implementing stuff directly in the Web UI. But sometimes a browser hurts.
Especially when it comes to batch operations and logging the progress and success it is nice to have the console at your fingertips and not to fiddle around in the production stack.
Need time to try it out. Until then.
That's the experience I've been having with the shell and the desktop companion.
Several very successful applications have web-based as well as app/mobile app interfaces. NextCloud is but one example. I use the different interfaces when that particular interface makes the task-at-hand easier than the other interface. In Ploa’s case, it gives the “power users” who are tasked with maintaining a site a better tool for fine-tuning the site.